No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:24:41 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:24:41] S1: Yeah. We just turned on number one. So we went critical back in November. That was our first criticality. That was what you'd call a a cold criticality or critical pile. And just a few days ago, we made power for the first time in our first reactor. So that's the the Ward 250 reactor. Obviously, the next goal is go turn on another one, but there's a sort of a success metric here that we talk about in the company, and and we call it tick rate. So tick rate is is how we judge ourselves and how we judge other people in the nuclear field. Tick rate is you know, comes from video games. Right? And it's sort of the the time in between changes in the game state. Right? And for us, what this means is how long from the founding of our company to the first time we split an Adam to the second time to the third time to the fourth time. And the goal of the company is to get that tick rate as low as possible. Right? So our first ever mark from filing in Delaware to first atom split was two years and four months. From Project Nova, first atom split to the second time here in this reactor was about seven months. And the goal is to get that window as short as possible, and we will get it down to minutes. This company will get will will get to the point where we have a new reactor turning on every few minutes. And when we do that, if you look at the the economics of nuclear, it really is driven by how quickly and cheaply can you produce plants. Right? The uranium is very cheap. Right? The the fuel is very cheap. The question is, can you produce plants quickly and cheaply? And that is going to be driven by iteration and by scale, which ultimately is driven by tick rate. So I'm very proud of the team. We've done some enormous, incredible things that no other nuclear startup has been able to do yet, but we are nowhere near done. We're very hungry, and we're gonna make that tick rate, you know, six months and then four and then one and then into the minutes.
00:26:31 · S0
[00:26:31] S0: Welcome to OR two fifty. Wow. So where you are standing right now is the first advanced reactor to ever make power by a startup. The first advanced reactor ever built outside of a national laboratory. This is the fifth new nuclear device to make power in The United States since the year 2000. Valor is the only private company founded since the discovery of nuclear fission that has ever made nuclear power. And this is really the thing that that is unique about what we're doing is that we're a new team. We're a new company, and we're attacking nuclear fission from first principles. You all the other companies in the space who've actually made power before were, you know, are a 100 year old or a 150 year old utilities, defense contractors, large engineering corporations, and they haven't really done fundamental r and d. What they've done is they've picked up sort of government work, commercialized it a little bit, done some supply chain integration, but this is like startup mindset applied to nuclear fission and there's a lot of things about this plant that's different that you'll be able to see. The first one is what we're looking at right here. This big awesome structure is called the Modular Citadel. I'm gonna talk to you for a few minutes about concrete and it's gonna sound like I'm a big concrete nerd and I guess that's okay. But this is actually some of the more innovative stuff that we've done in this reactor. The purpose of this concrete is a BioShield. The reason we're able to stand here and not be receiving unhealthy doses of radiation right now is because there's 78 inches of concrete in front of this reactor. If this concrete were not here we would not be able to stand here but it's actually very special concrete. The modular citadel is a series of precast blocks So each of these blocks was actually created in a factory. It's our factory. We have a what we call the Citadel factory in Salt Lake City and we have a production line where we could create 3,000 blocks a year that are identical to these. And they arrive here on a truck, and then they get placed by this crane up here. So that's why we have this crane. They can place these blocks. And what's really awesome about this is people have thought about doing this before in nuclear. They thought about free cast blocks.
00:28:43 · S0
But the problem is, well, if you're gonna put two concrete blocks together, if you were to zoom in on a microscopic level, those blocks are actually not touching. Right? Nothing's actually touching on a microscopic level. You have a little gap between there, and gamma rays can slip between the gaps, and neutrons can slip between the gaps. So what you can't see here and I'll show you some photos afterward is that if you were to look with an x-ray in that seam right there you would actually see that the concrete itself follows what we call a tortuous path. So it's a sine wave. So the concrete on every seam follows a sine wave curve and actually on the vertical edges as well. So if you were looking at vertical seam you would also see a sine wave. If you were to look in the corners you would see a sine wave. There is no straight path from the inside of the reactor to the outside through the modular citadel for a ray to follow straight through concrete. And what's even more interesting is that traditionally when people have thought of this, because it's really hard to get that casting shape right and to get it to actually be solid enough to bear all of this weight, the way that they get around this is they would grout it. So they would grout it with more concrete. You'd have like sort of a wet concrete mix that you use to seal them together. This has no grout. These blocks are literally just stacked. In fact there's no mechanical lock between them either. There are no bolts. There are no screws. We do have this frame around it. This is called a seismic frame. We did this we actually don't need it according to our engineering calculations. The Utah State Building Code, there's a disagreement about whether or not we need a seismic frame. They're like, oh, let's just put it on just to be safe. But the entire Citadel has no fastening of any kind in the blocks. And what that means is we went from three months, which is what it would normally take to build a BioShield like this, to we stack this in about forty two hours.
00:30:40 · Sarah Guo
[00:30:40] S2: How do you explain the pace of what you're capable of doing here versus other people that are trying and have been trying?
00:30:47 · Isaiah Taylor
[00:30:47] S1: Yeah. The pace is extraordinary. And, you know, of course, I'm proud of my team. Of course, I'm, I think Valor is the best nuclear company out there, but I would argue empirically, we have the the highest pace of any nuclear company in the world, and it's not close. And the reason for that is two things. One is we are obsessed with simplicity. We want our designs to be as simple as possible. We would rather have a simpler machine that's easier to build that we can build at higher scale than a machine that's more efficient, that's more performant. We have ruthlessly deleted complexity, deleted parts, deleted systems where they're not necessary. The other thing is we picked a super safe architecture, and and this is, I think, a point that it's hard to tell from the outside because every reactor looks the same from the outside, and and every CEO says that the reactor is safe. And and and to some extent, they all are, right, because they're highly regulated, and we make sure that they're safe. But there are levels to this. Right? And it goes back to the the previous conversation we had about odds versus consequence. A tracer fueled graphite moderated helium cooled reactor of the geometry that we've built it here is just about as safe as humanity knows how to build a nuclear reactor, and that actually allows us to move faster. Right? And that's going to allow us to scale as well. The lower that we can keep that consequence, the greater we're gonna be able to scale and the faster we're gonna be able to move. The last thing is just the way that we have shaped this team. I have built this team very, very carefully. I am deeply involved in every hiring decision, and we have filtered nuclear as an industry for people with extreme agency, people with extreme bias to action. And, actually, we we have a lot of people from outside nuclear. Right? A lot of the people here now have more nuclear experience than, you know, any other startup because they've actually turned a plant on. But when they walked in, they had never seen a nuclear reactor before. But what they had done is built hard things in the real world. Right? And so we try to find those people who built hard things. And then within nuclear, I particularly love to find people that started in nuclear because they loved it, and they realized it was really slow.
00:32:55 · Isaiah Taylor, Sarah Guo
And then they left, and they're like, screw this. I'm gonna go do something interesting. And then they, you know, built a ton of hardware somewhere else, and then I convinced them to come back. Because I know that they love it, and I'm like, if you come back here, you're gonna be able to actually build and actually execute, but in something that that I know you love. So, also lots of people from the traditional nuclear world, but but those people we filter very, very hard for, do you wanna do science? Do you wanna, like, write papers, or do you want to build reactors and turn them on? And, the entire Valor team is laser focused on that. [00:33:32] S2: How much of the premise of Valor is possible now comes from there are increasing demands for power, you know, in The United States largely driven by AI compute?